Decoding Consumer Emotion

1) The Founders

Ranjan Kumar, Bharat Singh and Lava Kumar

2) The Idea

While running his adtech firm Redcastle, Ranjan realised that brands spend huge sums on marketing campaigns but still measure their effectiveness via question-and-answer surveys. Purchase decisions are often driven by the subconscious mind, but standard survey questionnaires cannot capture emotional factors. So, he teamed up with his company's engineering head, Bharat Singh, and started a second venture to help brands understand how consumers connect with their products/services at an emotional level. In January 2018, their common friend, Lava Kumar, joined to lead product development.

3) How It Works

For the first two years, they focussed on developing a consumer research platform called Affect Lab 2.0 that could track consumers' emotional and cognitive reactions. The online SaaS platform has integrated three technologies - brainwave mapping, which uses a headset to track brain pulses and decipher attention level and mental effort; facial coding, which uses a web camera to analyse expressions; and eye tracking, which again uses a web camera to track what is capturing people's attention.

Entropik has processed about 11,000 unique content pieces, including products/services and promotional campaigns to provide user feedback. It has filed for six patents. Nielsen is the only other company in India that measures neuro-based cognition (brain mapping) to track consumer emotion, but it does not use the other two.

4) Growth

From five in 2017, the company now has 55-plus enterprise customers across North America, Europe and South-east Asia. It also has access to a 50 million-strong consumer pool across 60 countries. Some of its key clients include GroupM, ITC, Myntra, IMRB, Kadence, Essilor, CavinKare, Xiaomi, Tata Chemicals, UB Group and TAM Media Research. The SaaS solution is sold as a product and can be integrated with other platforms. The start-up also offers a pay-per-use subscription model.